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Mechanical Doping, Again?

There is going to be a television show in France tonight that supposedly shows that professional riders used mechanical doping in the Strade Bianche race in Tuscany and the Coppi e Bartali stage race, also in Italy. Fuck.

This is all getting so ridiculous. Supposedly there are new ways to propel the bicycle with a motor that is very light and pretty powerful. Somewhere between 60 and 250 watts. 60 extra watts would be crazy nice. 250w, unbelievable.

I’m going to just go over to Lawrence and do a MTB marathon now, and ride my bike, powered by my own two legs/body, around in 10 mile circles for 50 miles or so. Hopefully I can not think about how screwed up this sport has been my whole career. It is depressing.

Tucker is definitely interested in birds nowadays. This will be his first MTB race.

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25 thoughts on “Mechanical Doping, Again?”

I really wish the use of the term “doping”, when it means a motor, would go away.
It is NOT doping, it is cheating pure and simple.
This is like using the term “gate” (as in Watergate), for everything that goes bad.

It’s so sad where the sport has gone. I did 1,000 consecutive rides in 1,000 days. I was so proud to be a “cyclist.” Now I too am depressed by the events from doping, to mechanical doping. Cycling professionally and recreational should be clean and sober, and with one’s own two legs. Period. Thank you for your daily posts. I read almost every one. My blog during my rides was ridingtorecovery.com in case you’re interested.

Why the fuck do you care what people use when they cycling recreationaly? I am strongly considering ditching my car and getting a battery powered bike to help get me the 42 miles to work and back. I guess I should be ashamed of myself.

if you neither start nor finish on the “doped” bike, avoiding detection would be a lot easier. the rider would switch bikes during multiple “mechanicals”, the moto-bike goes on top of the car, then the car drives away and they switch it for a regular bike before they get back to the impound area. i think that mechanical doping would be much easier to get away with than blood doping because the cheaters can avoided having the moto-bike getting inspected by simply never having it together with the regular bikes, except during the race.

one more thing: they probably are not using the doped bike to out-accelerate their opponents to win. they more likely ride it at the back, eating, drinking, and relaxing while everyone else tires, before switching to a regular bike, which gives them a “cleaner” path to victory.

Not your whole career.. prior to the 1990s the landscape was a little different. There was cheating to be sure but it was much more work for much less payout. With the era of the “game changing” drugs the benefit of doping increased exponentially.
At the same time, Lemond brought the sport onto the world stage and ushered in the era of big money.
Put those things together and you saw a major shift in the ethics of cycling.

What would you call holding a cork in your teeth while racing? One attached to a wire with the other end attached to a moving car? That was 100 years ago and they also hopped on trains now and then along with other chicanery. Cheating was cheating then and cheating is cheating now while the sanctioning bodies over the years have never been 100% dedicated to trying to stop it.
Same s__t, different day.

Anybody who watches professional cycling might as well watch WWF wrestling too. Both are fake and not believable. I have no idea what in the hell I am watching anymore. It’s sad, they are wrecking their own sport and turning so many fans off including myself. I used to watch a ton of pro cycling, I could care less now. The motors were the last straw…

I’m starting to think pro wrestling has MORE credibility than pro cycling. NOBODY believes the wrestling shows are not 100% fake and scripted, do they? But plenty of us still cling to the idea that pro cycling rewards the best rider instead of the most clever cheater. The pile of straws is getting pretty big these days while the UCI makes their usual half-assed efforts to catch the cheaters only for the scandals to blow up again and again.